Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
https://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Mistake-Murder-Secret-Experiments/dp/193629608XDate this lecture was recorded: October 2, 1992.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses rarely. I used to say to my groups, if you haven’t taken enough that you think you may have done too much, then you did too little.”
“Death by astonishment is a real danger in [psychedelic] places. I mean, these places are not simply strange, or amazing, or highly peculiar. They are absolutely confounding.”
“True spirituality is a very here and now matter. One should visit the sick and imprisoned, clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for orphans, feed the hungry. That’s what the spiritual life is about. It’s very down to Earth, straightforward.”
“In terms of suggesting you are a more spiritually advanced person if you take psychedelics. I don’t really see any evidence for that.”
“It’s too hard for the ego-maniac to take psychedelics. The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down.”
“I think history is a state of chemical deprivation that allows ancient animal patterns of behavior that degrade and confuse us to re-emerge and stabilize themselves.”
“Ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead people.”
A Terrible Mistake:
The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments
by H.P. Albarelli
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we’re going to
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continue with the next segment of the Terrence McKenna talk that I began playing last week.
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Among the usual wide range of topics that come up in one of Terrence’s talks, in this one he
00:00:36 ►
goes into a very introspective rap about his own spirituality that, well, I don’t remember hearing
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it before. And then, well, about 40 minutes from
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now, you’re going to hear him speculate about what our current century might be like. Now,
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keep in mind that this talk was given in 1992, which was over a quarter of a century ago.
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Now, I think you’ll be impressed at how accurately he describes our world today.
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Of course, at the time, he believed that his predictions would come true much sooner,
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but sadly they are now coming true today.
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So, let’s join him now, and you can decide for yourself how close to the truth Terence McKenna could
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actually be in predicting the future when his predictions were grounded in the default world.
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A few comments in that regard. A few comment on those questions that I had earlier?
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Lin-Marc Gullis’ theory that all of life, all of plant life,
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is a reorganization of bacteria,
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and all of animal life is a further reorganization of bacterial life
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just to get bacteria to move around from place to place.
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And the cerebral cortex is just a lot of that modified spirochetes
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that have organized themselves in a certain way.
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And then in my reading of her, the way you put human beings in this picture is that we’re just an experiment
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in the way station of bacterial life, which may or may not work.
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In other words, our destiny is not really in our hands.
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To think that we can control our fate is really hubris or illusion.
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Well, it’s certainly illusion. I mean, it’s pretty clear we don’t control our fate is really hubris or illusion. Well, it’s certainly illusion.
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I mean, it’s pretty clear we don’t control our fate.
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Yes, you see, one way of looking at evolution,
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I mean, I just offer this as a heuristic insight,
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is that life achieved absolute perfection with the first organism.
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And then this first organism underwent mutation.
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That’s a kind of damage,
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which it then repaired the mutation
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through a strategy of complexification.
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And then there was more mutation
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and more repair through complexification.
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So what we represent is a massive chunk of scar tissue,
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the culmination of billions of years of repairing the perfect first life form.
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And all this complexity that has been added on since the first achievement
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is simply a response to the damage done to it by incoming cosmic radiation.
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I don’t believe that.
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You see, that’s a theory where you assume everything is driven by the past.
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I think that what is really hanging up modern biology
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is its absence, its unwillingness to entertain the possibility that life is driven by purpose.
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This is an old chestnut in the philosophy of science.
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It’s called the issue of teleology.
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Teleology is a fancy word meaning purpose.
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And what happened, you see, is it’s just simply a legacy of our intellectual history.
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When Darwin developed the theory of evolution in the 19th century,
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English intellectual society was under the sway of Christianity.
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And it was possible as recently as 150 years ago,
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to claim yourself to be an intellectual
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and to actually maintain in polite society
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that the earth was created by God
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at 9 a.m. on September the 4th,
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4004 B.C.
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150 years ago in England,
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people believed this with perfect confidence that they were at the cutting edge of intellectual understanding.
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Well, Darwin wanted to overcome deism, which was this all-pervasive belief in an interventionist creator who was literally guiding the flight of every atom
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and the fall of every leaf.
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And Darwin said,
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we don’t need this kind of invasive deistic plenum.
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Let’s just take the process of mutation,
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a random process driven by he knew not what, we now know largely driven
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by incidental cosmic radiation reaching the surface of the earth.
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Let’s take mutation and natural selection, another random process.
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And when we run these two random processes head on, lo and behold,
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out come flamingos, cockroaches, hummingbirds, coral reefs, palm trees, and ourselves.
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But I think that, and you know, the co-discoverer of evolution,
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who, if I believed in reincarnation, I would claim him as my own,
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Alfred Russell Wallace, was unable to agree with Darwin.
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And he said, no, that accounts for minor change in organisms, natural selection.
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But how can you use those processes to account for something like, for instance, the metamorphosis of insects?
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A caterpillar changing into a butterfly involves the chemical coordination of hundreds, if not thousands, of genes
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doing a perfectly integrated and flawless ballet of transformation.
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How incrementally could you ever get a situation where a caterpillar undergoes mutation into
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a butterfly unless there is some third factor at work in evolution.
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And Wallace thought that it was an appetition, an appetite, a tendency toward an end state.
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And that compass notion of evolution means that you’re steering toward a goal.
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Now, in common speech, when we use the word evolution, we usually mean this.
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But orthodox biologists, I remember when I was studying evolution,
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I had a professor who said, do not use the word evolution unless you are talking about a process involving genes.
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In other words, don’t talk about the evolution of the novel or of abstract expressionism or the evolution of society or the evolution of a political viewpoint.
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This is all bad thinking. have reclaimed evolution as the notion of progressive motion movement
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toward higher and higher states of development.
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But 19th century evolutionists refused to talk about advanced and less advanced
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or higher and lower when they talked about evolution.
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They just saw it as a random process playing itself out.
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I don’t think so.
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I think we are called that nature is hyperdimensional in its architectonics
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and that we are flowing toward a culminating purpose,
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probably the shedding of matter as the vehicle of our becoming.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I just wanted to ask you a question about do you think the information that is contained
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in psilocybin, DMT, all that hallucinogenics, do you think that the information is self-contained
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or is it actually more of just a way of tuning our brains into a more cosmic frequency that exists in the psilocybin
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or is the psilocybin just a mediator to a drastic way of tuning into a more cosmic broadcast?
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Well, it’s hard for me to imagine that it could be in the psilocybin because psilocybin is a very simple molecule.
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I mean, it’s a small molecule.
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It’s a planar molecule.
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It seems to me what must be happening
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is that we are embedded in an ocean of information
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and psilocybin somehow changes our channel slightly.
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You know, ordinary consciousness is created by a neurotransmitter called serotonin,
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and 5-hydroxytryptamine, suggestively a very close relative of psilocybin and DMT.
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And it seems to me, I think I mentioned this a little bit in the talk last night, that we have evolved a neurotransmitter which has the effect of narrowing the focus of consciousness to what is operationally defined by the body as the here and now.
00:10:11 ►
In other words, the body is by toxic or life-threatening chemicals like water.
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I mean, you don’t want the body’s need to preserve itself.
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But what they do serve is an expansion of mental function.
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And it may be, you know, that these neurotransmitters are in the act
00:11:06 ►
of evolving we no longer need to fear the immediate environment well maybe
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that’s a cheerful overstatement but one would like to think that we no longer
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need to fear the immediate environment as much as we did when we were locked in competition with other animal
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species. Now, it’s to me highly suggestive the fact that we contain and metabolize DMT
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in the course of ordinary metabolism. What does it mean that the most powerful of all psychedelic hallucinogens is a part of normal human metabolism?
00:11:51 ►
The pineal gland, whose function is very mysterious, is doing a lot of chemistry that looks like psychedelic chemistry.
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It’s elaborating harmine- like beta-carbolines.
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So it’s possible that literally when we take these tryptamine hallucinogens,
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we are, as it were, dressing up in the mental furniture of the distant future
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that we are experiencing
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a state of consciousness
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toward which we are naturally
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evolving
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and that over time and through
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natural selection
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the serotonergic neurotransmitters
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are making way
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for these more powerful
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psychedelic compounds.
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And something like imagination looks to me like a self-generated internal involvement
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with compounds which at some point in the future might replace the compounds of ordinary metabolism
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and shift our mental life literally into another dimension.
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Yeah?
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Why did anyone that uses organic psychedelics
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for a period of time as a daily dietary supplement,
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like every day for an extended period of time?
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Because nobody really talks about that.
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How much do you use?
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A gram, a gram and a half?
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Yes, while one can do that,
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I’ve sort of thought that maybe this isn’t such a good idea
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because I’m interested more in spectacular episodes of intoxication
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with the exception of cannabis, of course,
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rather than integrating it as a lifestyle.
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The only one that’s doing this is a lifestyle.
00:14:03 ►
I feel really alone right now. Well, is there anybody who wants to join this gentleman in his isolation? At times I’ve done that, but I found it to be, well, here’s the thing. You have to get the dose the dose is very critical at us if
00:14:26 ►
you take say I would say a half a gram to a gram every day my experience of
00:14:33 ►
that was simply a kind of anxiety a kind of being set forward a speed type effect
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if you take if you say well then I don want that, so I’m going to lift the dose slightly, and you go to say two and a half grams, the problem I had with that is life quickly evolves into being so strange that I couldn’t handle it. In other words, it’s very important for me to dip into
00:15:08 ►
these places and then to get out shit in me, I think.
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If you really want to leave us all behind,
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and bourgeois values and your job and Bill Clinton and the ozone hole
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and all of that behind,
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then if you start taking psilocybin, let’s say four grams every three days,
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I guarantee you within a month there will be very few people that you will have much in common with.
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And you will be very happy.
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You will be very happy with your circumstance generally, I think, but you will have evolved a point of view, a set of values,
00:16:07 ►
an expectation that most people will find a lot of difficulty relating to.
00:16:15 ►
A shroom shape, let’s say, fresh fruit, ice, a gram. You’re looking at, what, maybe three to five hours of time involved with uh-huh so that leaves 20
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hours left in the day to do everything else you need to do I mean you do know but what is the dose
00:16:34 ►
again say Graham huh well I don’t know see it may be just a matter of personal styles. When I take psilocybin, I give it 110% of my attention. So I can’t do it and work at the computer or make phone calls or shop or deliver my children to lessons and stuff like that. And so my idea with it is to completely come down
00:17:06 ►
between doses
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and then, you know,
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you’re virgin again.
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Do you have a situation
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where it’s not having a effect?
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Yeah, you don’t keep hallucinating.
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No, it becomes something else.
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See, I don’t want you to feel PA,
00:17:41 ►
but I think that what people do with drugs that is probably a bad idea is they take too little too often. And that the best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses, rarely. rarely I mean I used to say to my groups if you haven’t taken enough that you
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think you may have done too much then you did too little in other words you
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really want to dissolve the boundary you don’t want to integrate it into this
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world you want to have an experience which you can then integrate into this world. You want to have an experience which you can then integrate
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into this world after the trip.
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And you’re the one
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that always talks about language
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and thought processes.
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And I feel as though
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most of my best work
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is under that period
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of one to one and a half grams
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of dosage.
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And I just don’t understand
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how the recommended experience is much more than what I’m doing, obviously.
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Well, have you taken large doses?
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Well, isn’t that much more interesting?
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I guess it comes down to what it is you’re looking to do while you’re doing it.
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It’s not a matter of interesting.
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It’s a matter of what your purpose is,
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what your intent is,
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what your trip is.
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Well, at these higher doses,
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you can’t do anything.
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Of course, that’s my point.
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You know?
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I mean,
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hanging on to the floor
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is a major program to be executed.
00:19:03 ►
Yeah.
00:19:03 ►
How do you exist in, let’s say, the parallel universe? How. Can you exist in,
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well, let’s say,
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the parallel universe?
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Can a person exist
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in the parallel universe?
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You mean for days and days?
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Yeah.
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I mean, could you live?
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You can live,
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but you alarm your friends
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and quickly become
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an object of community concern
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because, you know, for ordinary people,
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you are what is called nuts.
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Doesn’t experience just become a type of a,
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almost like a three-dimensional TV?
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I mean, you just listen to it.
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It’s like, it becomes a drug?
00:19:39 ►
No, I think you underestimate how strange it is.
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I don’t think you could ever get used to these places.
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You know, sometimes people ask me if DMT is dangerous.
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And the honest answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.
00:20:00 ►
And death by astonishment is a real danger in these places.
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I mean, these places are not simply strange or amazing or highly peculiar.
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They are absolutely confounding.
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I mean, that’s what I’m trying to get across,
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is this is not going to require just some minor adjustment of
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our worldview these are the things they said were impossible the things they promised assured
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were impossible are possible uh the greatest secret that has been kept from us is that the world is a thousand times,
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a million times stranger
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than your wildest supposition.
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And how they keep the lid on this stuff,
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I do not understand.
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I mean, I don’t understand
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why I’m the only person saying this
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because I’m completely convinced
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of my own ordinariness.
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I am only a human being.
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I represent all of you.
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What happens to me would happen to you.
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There’s nothing special about me.
00:21:17 ►
Well, then, my God, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
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It’s weird.
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the lid on this stuff it’s weird it’s more if a fleet of flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow it would not it would not
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change the fact that the weirdest thing in the universe is the DMT flash flying
00:21:38 ►
saucers landing on the south lawn of the White House is a positively mundane possibility compared to this thing,
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which is real. It’s here. It’s now. You don’t have to go to Babaji. You don’t have to go
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to the Himalayas. It’s three tokes away. And yet, you know, we argue, is it possible? What
00:22:02 ►
does it mean? Is it this? Is it that? It’s amazing to me.
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I mean, it is the new world.
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The Europeans eventually discovered the new world,
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but they had to sail galleons three months through hell to get there.
00:22:16 ►
This is three tokes and 30 seconds away,
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and it is the absolute confounding exhibit of the whole structure of Western civilization.
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How can they keep the lid on it?
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I don’t get it.
00:22:31 ►
Where does individual spiritual development fit in without the use of hallucinogens in your world or into your scheme of thinking?
00:22:42 ►
And two last nights you talked about the business of being should be the cultivation of love.
00:22:48 ►
And I’d like to hear more about that now or later.
00:22:51 ►
And third, I’d like to know what do you think you would be doing today in life
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if you had never used any psychedelics?
00:23:01 ►
Well, first to the spiritual question, which is an interesting question to me
00:23:07 ►
everyone casts the psychedelic experience in terms of being a subcategory of the spiritual quest
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i’m not exactly sure about that i’ve taken lots of psychedelics
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over nearly 30 years now
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and, you know,
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I have a marriage dissolving.
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I have people who will tell you
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I’m a terrible person
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to negotiate a contract with.
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I feel myself to be
00:23:42 ►
a moral paragon of nothing.
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And I’m not sure it has anything to do with the spiritual quest.
00:23:52 ►
It seems to me true spirituality is a very here and now matter.
00:24:00 ►
One should visit the sick and imprisoned,
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clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for orphans, feed the hungry.
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That’s what the spiritual life is about.
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It’s very down to earth, straightforward.
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I’m very puzzled, and I put more than psychedelics in this category.
00:24:26 ►
What, like mantras, yantras, practices,
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do these things really ameliorate the suffering of the human condition?
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They may be good for something.
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The question is what?
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Perhaps indirectly the psychedelics synergize the spiritual
00:24:48 ►
life because they just show you that life is to be taken seriously and there is a great deal of it
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to be assimilated. But in terms of suggesting that you are a more spiritually advanced person
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if you take psychedelics, I don’t really see any evidence for that.
00:25:11 ►
I do think that you cannot take psychedelics without losing a portion of your ego
00:25:19 ►
because it’s too hard for the egomaniac to take psychedelics.
00:25:28 ►
The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down, I think.
00:25:38 ►
This is an interesting question, this question of, you know, like the question I asked myself. Here we are. We are psychedelic people, presumably by some high percentage. Are we in any way morally superior to people who don’t take psychedelics? Maybe we’re a little bit gentler and more open minded, but probably in any mud wrestling situation, we can be
00:26:06 ►
just as down and dirty as the next person to some degree.
00:26:13 ►
So I see it more, that’s why I don’t think of myself as a guru.
00:26:19 ►
I think of myself as an explorer of a geography, the purposes of which are probably multiple.
00:26:28 ►
In other words, I suppose we can use psychedelics
00:26:32 ►
to shape personalities and brainwash people
00:26:36 ►
and control them.
00:26:37 ►
And I suppose we can use it to lead people
00:26:41 ►
to make peace with death, mortality,
00:26:47 ►
their own limitations. It seems to me it’s a morally neutral dimension and it can be used for good or ill and maybe slightly
00:26:56 ►
edging toward the good because it’s very hard for egomaniacs to do anything with this stuff. The CIA’s involvement with LSD is an instructive situation.
00:27:10 ►
The CIA got on to LSD well ahead of everybody else.
00:27:15 ►
And the first notion was, and if you’re interested in this,
00:27:19 ►
you can read J. Stephen, or no, the other one, Acid Dreams,
00:27:24 ►
that book, Martin Lee’s book, and Schlain was the co-author.
00:27:29 ►
The CIA’s first assumption about LSD was that it was a kind of super truth serum,
00:27:37 ►
and that they could kidnap KGB agents and give them LSD, and they would spew out all their contacts and so forth and so on.
00:27:46 ►
So a year of researching that possibility convinced them they were on the wrong track.
00:27:53 ►
And so then they decided it isn’t a truth serum, it’s an anti-truth serum.
00:27:59 ►
We will give our agents this drug and if they ever fall into enemy hands,
00:28:06 ►
they will take it, and then it will be impossible for the enemy
00:28:09 ►
to get any coherent account out of them of what is going on.
00:28:14 ►
Well, so then a few months of that, and they discovered,
00:28:17 ►
no, under some circumstances, our people just tell all under LSD.
00:28:23 ►
our people just to tell all under LSD.
00:28:26 ►
So then they decided that they could program a Manchurian candidate type situation with it.
00:28:30 ►
Well, then that was abandoned.
00:28:33 ►
And I think largely they have lost interest in this stuff.
00:28:36 ►
I asked in the Amazon, I asked the mushroom at one point
00:28:41 ►
because I could see that we were going to carry it back
00:28:44 ►
to the world in some form.
00:28:46 ►
I said, can’t this be perverted?
00:28:49 ►
Can’t it be misused?
00:28:52 ►
And it said, only the good can come near this.
00:29:01 ►
Well, maybe good doesn’t mean exactly what we think it means you know it isn’t a kind of piety
00:29:07 ►
worn on your cuff it’s uh it’s something else it’s a sincere wish to understand that’s the
00:29:16 ►
motivation that the psychedelics will turbocharge as to your question about what would I be doing if I hadn’t taken psychedelics
00:29:25 ►
well I don’t know
00:29:27 ►
what I was doing
00:29:29 ►
what I assumed I would end up doing
00:29:30 ►
before I took psychedelics
00:29:32 ►
was hopefully end up teaching art history
00:29:35 ►
in a very exclusive eastern girls school
00:29:38 ►
somewhere
00:29:38 ►
for a long long time
00:29:41 ►
it was a kind of Nabokovian lechery
00:29:44 ►
it was my life’s plan.
00:29:49 ►
And what was yours?
00:29:50 ►
Oh, and love.
00:29:51 ►
Love.
00:29:52 ►
Well, my analysis of what psychedelics do,
00:29:59 ►
if you think not about my trip or your trip,
00:30:03 ►
but thousands, tens of thousands of these experiences.
00:30:08 ►
What can we say that would be true of every psychedelic experience, every high-dose psychedelic
00:30:14 ►
experience? What can we say that would be a general truism? What you could say is that
00:30:20 ►
psychedelics dissolve boundaries. That’s what they do. The boundary between nature and society, between mind and body, between self and other, they dissolve boundaries.
00:30:35 ►
And this is what love does when it is working right.
00:30:41 ►
working right I mean
00:30:41 ►
you are able to
00:30:43 ►
place yourself
00:30:44 ►
in the second
00:30:45 ►
position
00:30:46 ►
for a child
00:30:47 ►
for a lover
00:30:49 ►
for a cause
00:30:51 ►
for whatever it is
00:30:53 ►
you know
00:30:53 ►
you take
00:30:55 ►
second
00:30:55 ►
position
00:30:56 ►
and so I see
00:30:58 ►
them
00:30:59 ►
essentially
00:30:59 ►
as
00:31:01 ►
aphrodisiacs
00:31:04 ►
of a strange sort.
00:31:06 ►
They empower not genital prowess,
00:31:11 ►
but real caring by showing that all differences are illusions,
00:31:21 ►
that what is real is the unbroken, seamless plenum of being.
00:31:28 ►
And this is what we need to learn
00:31:30 ►
because our whole social construct
00:31:36 ►
has been based on the establishment and maintenance of boundaries.
00:31:40 ►
I mean, we are the most boundary-obsessed human society that has ever existed.
00:31:47 ►
You know, when I go to the Amazon and spend time with the upriver people,
00:31:52 ►
the hardest thing for me to get used to is that I never have any privacy, ever.
00:31:59 ►
You know, I hang my hammock in the longhouse,
00:32:03 ►
and, you know, people are fighting and giving birth and having sex and arguing and doing all these things.
00:32:09 ►
Even the act of defecation is not necessarily private.
00:32:17 ►
So boundary dissolution and boundary maintenance is what really, anxiety about these things is what characterizes our society.
00:32:28 ►
I think, and I will mention it briefly here before the break,
00:32:33 ►
that some of you may have somehow escaped being exposed to my theory of human evolution,
00:32:40 ►
which is contained in Food of the Gods.
00:32:51 ►
which is contained in Food of the Gods, I think that we achieved a kind of perfection in human relations and in the relationship between human beings and nature sometime in the last million years
00:33:00 ►
and that we maintained that relationship until as recently as 15,000 years ago.
00:33:08 ►
And we achieved this through a quasi-symbiotic, or let’s put it this way,
00:33:15 ►
an incipiently symbiotic relationship to psilocybin.
00:33:22 ►
You see, I’ll give this to you in the short form
00:33:25 ►
because probably most of you have heard it.
00:33:27 ►
All primates organize themselves
00:33:31 ►
using male dominance hierarchies.
00:33:35 ►
You go clear back into lemurs and squirrel monkeys
00:33:39 ►
and it’s the hard-muscled, sharp-fanged young males
00:33:43 ►
who set the agenda and everybody else, sharp-fanged young males who set the agenda,
00:33:45 ►
and everybody else, women, children, weak older males, have to dance to that tune.
00:33:55 ►
This is a characteristic of primate organization.
00:33:59 ►
It is also a characteristic of our society today as we sit here,
00:34:04 ►
and we know that the suppression not only of women as individuals,
00:34:08 ►
but of the feminine itself as an idea has made us tremendously, has blocked our potential and made us tremendously neurotic.
00:34:18 ►
Well, I think that when we came down out of the trees, we were male dominators, hierarchically organized creatures,
00:34:28 ►
and then we encountered psilocybin as an item within our diet.
00:34:34 ►
And without anybody realizing what was happening, it constituted a chemical intervention against hierarchical organization.
00:34:44 ►
against hierarchical organization.
00:34:51 ►
And an orgiastic means sharing of sexual partners. This style arose in the wake of accepting psilocybin into the diet.
00:34:57 ►
Psilocybin promoted in low doses increased visual acuity.
00:35:03 ►
This is an established fact.
00:35:05 ►
And that allowed the psilocybin-using members of the species
00:35:09 ►
to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members.
00:35:12 ►
And human consciousness evolving, had been evolving, continued to evolve,
00:35:20 ►
and through the augmentation of psilocybin,
00:35:26 ►
to evolve and through the augmentation of psilocybin fell into a relationship of direct experience with this goddess-like Gaian totality, the mind of the earth.
00:35:34 ►
And then there was a dynamic, satisfying balance between the expression of human advanced cognitive faculties
00:35:48 ►
and a human sense of our place in nature and our roles vis-a-vis each other
00:35:55 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:35:57 ►
In short, paradise.
00:35:59 ►
And it persisted for, who knows, let’s say a million years.
00:36:07 ►
persisted for, who knows, let’s say a million years. And it only faded when the mushrooms became, through climatological change and migration, unavailable. And when the mushroom
00:36:16 ►
became scarce and scarcer and unavailable, after a million years of chemical suppression of the primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies, the old behavior, which had never been genetically removed from the picture, reemerged 12,000 years ago, no more. And it must have been like hell itself. People suddenly no longer were caring for each other. Suddenly men wanted to control the sexual and reproductive activities of women.
00:37:02 ►
of territory emerged.
00:37:05 ►
This is at the precise moment in time when agriculture was invented.
00:37:08 ►
Agriculture put an end
00:37:09 ►
to the nomadic yearly wanderings
00:37:12 ►
of the human family.
00:37:13 ►
It put emphasis on sedentary lifestyles.
00:37:20 ►
The problem with agriculture,
00:37:22 ►
especially in the early phase,
00:37:24 ►
was that it was so phenomenally successful.
00:37:27 ►
You can imagine farming the alluvial detritus of these river valleys that had never been touched.
00:37:33 ►
Surpluses were created.
00:37:36 ►
Surplus, in the presence of a dominator or hierarchical attitude, must be defended.
00:37:44 ►
And so suddenly you have haves and have nots, us and them.
00:37:48 ►
The most advanced structure on this planet 11,000 years ago was the grain tower at Jericho.
00:37:55 ►
It was a storage area for grain and it was a tower so that you could beat back attacks
00:38:02 ►
by hungry neighbors that you no longer identified with sufficiently to share your food.
00:38:09 ►
And in the absence of psilocybin, this structure emerged in the psyche,
00:38:18 ►
which we call ego.
00:38:20 ►
If you have psilocybin in your diet, the ego, it’s like taking chemotherapy or something. Group sexual experiences in a religious context are being orchestrated at the new and full moon.
00:38:47 ►
Sharing of food, sharing of child care, sharing of sexual partners.
00:38:52 ►
All that is ended when the ego is born.
00:38:58 ►
And the ego is the boundary establisher par excellence because it establishes me and mine
00:39:06 ►
as opposed to you and yours.
00:39:09 ►
And with the invention of agriculture,
00:39:13 ►
the establishment of large sedentary populations,
00:39:17 ►
that means cities,
00:39:18 ►
the establishment of specialized roles,
00:39:22 ►
that means kingship,
00:39:24 ►
the emergence of male dominance,
00:39:27 ►
the emergence of warfare.
00:39:29 ►
These are the institutions
00:39:31 ►
that are fatal
00:39:32 ►
to our higher aspirations,
00:39:36 ►
to our hopes,
00:39:37 ►
even at this moment
00:39:38 ►
as they were 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
00:39:42 ►
That’s why I think, you know,
00:39:44 ►
we have to chemically intervene
00:39:45 ►
because we have fallen into
00:39:47 ►
a dysfunctional relationship
00:39:50 ►
toward the components of our own psyche.
00:39:53 ►
And it’s fine if monkeys
00:39:56 ►
want to dominate each other.
00:39:58 ►
But when you have,
00:40:00 ►
in the space in which we existed
00:40:02 ►
in the psilocybin-maintained partnership mode,
00:40:07 ►
we developed language, symbolic representation, dance, theater, so forth and so on,
00:40:16 ►
and we acquired and empowered the tremendous imagination
00:40:21 ►
that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us that
00:40:26 ►
kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community minded creatures
00:40:36 ►
and in the hands of ego driven creatures it leads straight to Auschwitz and the
00:40:42 ►
hydrogen bomb as it did so I think know, history is a state of chemical deprivation
00:40:50 ►
that allows ancient animal patterns of behavior
00:40:56 ►
that degrade and confuse us to reemerge and stabilize themselves. And if it was appearing that there was scarcity now, what would the response be to that?
00:41:11 ►
You mean in the present situation?
00:41:13 ►
If the assumption is that there is scarcity now, then what would that invoke?
00:41:18 ►
If surplus…
00:41:19 ►
Well, what it invokes is an ever greater distance between those at the top and those at the bottom of the social pyramid
00:41:26 ►
and an ever fiercer and an emergence of ever more brutal behavior patterns,
00:41:35 ►
which is what we see happening.
00:41:38 ►
I mean, our world is getting uglier and meaner and more mean-spirited by the moment
00:41:45 ►
because those who have are so anxious about the fact that they might be asked to share it.
00:41:53 ►
I mean, what we have gone through in the last 12 years in this country
00:41:57 ►
is a tremendous transfer of wealth to the upper 2% of society and concomitantly a tremendous spread of
00:42:08 ►
anxiety alienation and a dehumanizing of
00:42:14 ►
the entire social enterprise I mean if
00:42:16 ►
we don’t get hold of ourselves the next
00:42:19 ►
century most of the world is going to be
00:42:22 ►
a toxic desert and then here and there there will be
00:42:26 ►
very well defended pleasure domes in which a very small number of incredibly wealthy people
00:42:34 ►
will live out lives of utterly self-indulgent hedonistic fantasy in denial of the moral catastrophe that they participated in
00:42:45 ►
in order to achieve that hedonic state of isolation.
00:42:51 ►
I mean, that’s clearly happening.
00:42:53 ►
Metaphorically, that’s what we have already.
00:42:56 ►
I mean, not to freak you out, but that’s where we’re sitting right now, you know?
00:43:00 ►
I mean, compared to Bosnia and Haiti and Somalia.
00:43:04 ►
now, you know, I mean, compared to Bosnia and Haiti and Somalia. But if fear plus creates defensiveness, and scarcity creates defensiveness, then what
00:43:11 ►
is the alternative?
00:43:13 ►
Well, neither create defensiveness except in the presence of the ego.
00:43:20 ►
In other words, what we have to do is teach people to care for each other as a primary value, not something you do after, you know, you pay for your Mercedes and all that, but as the primary value. We don’t have community. We have a free-for-all where the devil takes the hindmost,
00:43:46 ►
the most brutal and ruthless among us rise to the top,
00:43:51 ►
and everybody else has a foot on their neck.
00:43:57 ►
We are now in a hell of a fix because we’ve waited so long to address these problems.
00:44:04 ►
because we’ve waited so long to address these problems.
00:44:14 ►
There is not now enough gold, aluminum, iron, so forth, in the planet to raise everyone to a middle class standard as it’s enjoyed in Southern California.
00:44:20 ►
And yet we have unleashed these expectations in everyone by
00:44:26 ►
flagellating people with images of material wealth and comfort the whole we
00:44:35 ►
must re-empower the individual and the quality of individual experience in
00:44:42 ►
other words you have to convince somebody that you
00:44:46 ►
are a richer person on five grams of psilocybin than you are if you live in a
00:44:52 ►
five million dollar house and are spending fifty thousand dollars a year
00:44:56 ►
on psychotherapy because you’re miserable you see we have allowed
00:45:01 ►
ourselves to be tremendously disempowered by allowing our values to shift toward the material domain.
00:45:11 ►
You can’t take it with you, folks.
00:45:14 ►
But the soul is the vehicle that you do take with you into whatever dimensions of continuity exist beyond this mortal coil.
00:45:25 ►
So instead of balancing and replacing the tires on your Porsche, you should be balancing
00:45:35 ►
and replacing the tires on your after-death vehicle.
00:45:39 ►
After all, that’s the one that’s going to have to serve you well in the clinches, you see.
00:45:46 ►
Yeah.
00:45:47 ►
How have you worked with the terror in dissolving, you know, on your journey?
00:45:52 ►
How have you worked with the terror in dissolving the ego boundaries?
00:45:58 ►
Well, you’re right.
00:46:00 ►
There is a component of terror in this kind of work.
00:46:04 ►
You know, the Rolling Stones song you don’t
00:46:07 ►
get what you want you get what you need is never more true than with psychedelics but in terms of
00:46:13 ►
practical suggestions fear is has many aspects but one aspect of it is it has a chemistry and the
00:46:25 ►
chemistry of
00:46:26 ►
fear is
00:46:27 ►
fairly short
00:46:28 ►
term
00:46:28 ►
you’ve probably
00:46:29 ►
all experienced
00:46:30 ►
driving on
00:46:31 ►
the freeway
00:46:32 ►
and somebody
00:46:33 ►
cuts right
00:46:34 ►
in front of
00:46:35 ►
you and
00:46:36 ►
there is
00:46:36 ►
it feels like
00:46:38 ►
your body
00:46:38 ►
temperature
00:46:39 ►
must rise
00:46:40 ►
about five
00:46:40 ►
degrees in
00:46:41 ►
about a
00:46:42 ►
third of a
00:46:43 ►
second
00:46:43 ►
it’s an
00:46:44 ►
incredibly fast chemistry that goes on there and then in about five degrees in about a third of a second. It’s an incredibly fast chemistry that goes on there.
00:46:48 ►
And then in about five seconds, you fall back down to within normal parameters.
00:46:54 ►
The one way to deal with fear is sit still and wait.
00:46:59 ►
In other words, the psychedelic terror is usually fairly unfocused.
00:47:04 ►
It is simply raw terror.
00:47:07 ►
Well, just sit still and shut up and watch the chemicals in your mind tear those molecules apart.
00:47:15 ►
And rarely can the fear sustain itself more than five or ten minutes because it has the force of a blow.
00:47:28 ►
or ten minutes because it has to it has the force of a blow but then you can you can sustain the blow and chemical equilibrium returns the other thing and this is great very good advice don’t
00:47:36 ►
forget it it’s hard for Western people to keep it on their plate sing sing the way we relate to terror is we crunch clench withdraw and hunch over in some
00:47:52 ►
kind of fetal position like you’re being beat on what you want to do is is sit up straight
00:48:00 ►
straighten your spinal column open your air passages and begin to cycle oxygen
00:48:06 ►
through and if you sing in a very few minutes the chemical foundations of the
00:48:14 ►
fear will be washed away so that’s very practical the mantra it doesn’t matter
00:48:22 ►
mantra yantra you know everything becomes profound on psychedelics.
00:48:28 ►
I mean, I tend toward row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
00:48:34 ►
Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
00:48:43 ►
Oh, yes, what a heart-sinking assumption.
00:48:50 ►
My assumption was that we could skate by on questions alone.
00:48:58 ►
But what is your question?
00:49:04 ►
There were no questions. Okay. your question.
00:49:07 ►
There were no questions.
00:49:09 ►
Okay.
00:49:11 ►
So,
00:49:14 ►
an oblique request to override questions.
00:49:17 ►
Basically, what happens
00:49:18 ►
is I end up saying
00:49:19 ►
what I want to say anyhow
00:49:21 ►
because you may have noticed
00:49:22 ►
a certain logical gap
00:49:24 ►
between some of the questions and some of the answers.
00:49:28 ►
That’s not a failure of your own understanding.
00:49:33 ►
That’s what’s going on, as a matter of fact, you know.
00:49:38 ►
But you had a question.
00:49:42 ►
I just wanted to kind of introduce a new idea here.
00:49:45 ►
I mean, it’s probably an old idea, but also a new idea.
00:49:50 ►
This was years ago that I played the Ouija board a lot.
00:49:54 ►
And one strange evening I was playing and I asked the question,
00:49:58 ►
who are we talking to when we speak to the Ouija board?
00:50:01 ►
And the reply was, in your future, man will be able to speak
00:50:07 ►
with his ancestors, contrary to popular belief that you were speaking to your ancestors,
00:50:12 ►
which meant basically that in our future, we’re going to discover ways to talk to the
00:50:17 ►
past and deliver messages through the past. And in connection with the UFO experience, I was wondering if quite possibly that the extraterrestrial was actually us in the future.
00:50:31 ►
Coming back, you know, discover the technology of traveling through time, you know.
00:50:40 ►
And I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that.
00:50:42 ►
And I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that.
00:50:53 ►
Now watch how this question is perverted into an episode of speechifying on my part.
00:50:56 ►
I’m glad you asked that question.
00:51:03 ►
Well, I mean, I’ve thought a lot about this. I suppose in order to get into it, what I should do is just take a moment or two to actually describe for you my idea or my account of what it is that lies at the very center,
00:51:22 ►
or at least as far into the center as I’ve been able to push, of these experiences.
00:51:30 ►
To my mind, I mean, I mentioned here this morning that DMT seems to of the motifs are present at greater energy
00:51:48 ►
than they are in some of these other compounds and you know at the risk of
00:51:56 ►
repeating myself what happens to most people I think if they are able to remember it what an actual DMT flash is like
00:52:08 ►
is you know
00:52:11 ►
this stuff it’s vaporized in a glass pipe
00:52:15 ►
it’s smoked
00:52:16 ►
it comes on in about half a minute
00:52:19 ►
or less
00:52:20 ►
and is immensely stronger
00:52:23 ►
than any amount of psilocybin or LSD could conceivably be, I think.
00:52:30 ►
And what happens is, and I’ll speak in the first person just to make it manageable,
00:52:40 ►
what happens is I break into a space.
00:52:47 ►
First of all, I am fully myself.
00:52:50 ►
In other words, I am exactly who I was before.
00:52:54 ►
That’s why on one level I say DMT doesn’t affect your mind.
00:52:58 ►
You are not euphoric, ecstatic.
00:53:04 ►
You are exactly who you were before
00:53:06 ►
but there is a sense of pushing through a membrane of some sort
00:53:11 ►
there’s actually a sound as though someone had wadded up a cellophane bread wrapper
00:53:16 ►
that crackling sound
00:53:19 ►
which some people assumed erroneously were brain cells frying in your cerebellum.
00:53:27 ►
A friend of mine said, it’s your soul as radio intellect leaving your body through the top of your head.
00:53:36 ►
Well, whatever it is, you burst into a space, I burst into a space that is inhabited.
00:53:47 ►
That’s the first shocker.
00:53:49 ►
There is no ambiguity about it because there’s an ear-splitting cheer as you break into this space.
00:53:57 ►
It’s an elf nest of some sort. And there are hundreds of these self-dribbling jeweled basketballs, sort of.
00:54:10 ►
I mean, that’s a heavy download into English of what they are.
00:54:14 ►
But they are autonomous, separate from the background, and they bound forward, screaming hello, basically.
00:54:29 ►
forward screaming hello basically and for someone who expected insight into their relationship or their financial circumstances this is a fairly
00:54:35 ►
astonishing and rapid turn of development and they are intently focused upon you I mean when it happens to me they they
00:54:50 ►
they they yell hooray and then they are like long lost acquaintances they literally pour over you
00:55:00 ►
they crawl over you you’re being hugged by a troop of hyperspatial machine elves and they
00:55:08 ►
say you know you stay away so long you send so many but you come so rarely and we’re so happy
00:55:17 ►
to see you and then and there is a sense of being somehow without being able to cognize the sense of being somehow, without being able to cognize the logic of it,
00:55:26 ►
you’re underground.
00:55:28 ►
You can tell that you’re far underground.
00:55:31 ►
And these things, the main thing going on in this place,
00:55:36 ►
is that these things are creatures of language.
00:55:40 ►
They are elves of syntactical intent.
00:55:44 ►
They appear to be made of language
00:55:47 ►
not matter
00:55:48 ►
and they are in a process of continuous semantic transformation
00:55:54 ►
meaning is crawling across their surfaces
00:55:58 ►
in a state of continual metamorphosis
00:56:01 ►
and they are emitting sounds roughly analogous to some kind of
00:56:10 ►
music or language except that this is like no music or language you’ve ever
00:56:17 ►
heard because what it is is it is something capable of being visibly apprehended.
00:56:27 ►
It’s sound which you can see.
00:56:34 ►
It’s linguistic structure whose syntax is visible in three-dimensional space. And they use their voices to make objects
00:56:40 ►
which are, in some sense, the central focus of the experience
00:56:47 ►
because out of the air, out of their bodies, out of your body
00:56:52 ►
they condense, create and pluck these objects
00:56:58 ►
which they offer for your inspection
00:57:02 ►
and as you lean forward to look at one of these things,
00:57:06 ►
amidst this clamor of elf hysteria,
00:57:10 ►
you, as I said, are fully yourself.
00:57:13 ►
Your judgment is not impaired.
00:57:15 ►
And in fact, they are saying to you,
00:57:18 ►
fight excitement.
00:57:20 ►
Do not abandon yourself to amazement.
00:57:23 ►
In other words, they’re telling you stay down don’t just
00:57:27 ►
go off on some arm waving rave about how this is impossible and outlandish and outrageous
00:57:33 ►
try to stay focused on what we’re doing and what they show you are objects that are intrinsically and inherently impossible. So that these things made of tools, gold, ivory, cut stone, flesh, music, hope, odor,
00:57:55 ►
I mean, it’s hard to talk about.
00:57:57 ►
But when you direct your attention towards these things,
00:58:01 ►
you can tell by looking at it that if you could get it into three-dimensional space,
00:58:07 ►
if I could suddenly whip one out of my briefcase and display it to you,
00:58:13 ►
our world, our intellectual constructs would collapse upon themselves
00:58:18 ►
because this is impossible.
00:58:21 ►
Impossibly beautiful, impossibly constructed,
00:58:27 ►
defining of the laws of physics and of chemistry.
00:58:29 ►
So is there a, do you think there’s a multi-dimensional life force that is the same through the entire
00:58:36 ►
dimension?
00:58:38 ►
That’s a higher dimension, actually, maybe from the future, maybe, I mean, as far as
00:58:43 ►
three-dimensional time is concerned, there is no such thing.
00:58:46 ►
Besides what we’ve created.
00:58:47 ►
So are they actually trying to tell you that, okay, everything you see is impossible is not really impossible?
00:58:55 ►
Introducing to you that nothing is impossible and that that is our future way of thinking,
00:58:59 ►
is that nothing is impossible any longer, otherwise we’re doomed.
00:59:02 ►
Well, I have a sort of an, I almost said rational, but let’s say at least orderly kind of mind.
00:59:09 ►
So I tried to understand, you know, what could this be?
00:59:14 ►
So you make a list of hypotheses and then think about each hypothesis and test it against the evidence.
00:59:21 ►
Okay, hypothesis one, DMT is not a drug. It is an extraterrestrial communication
00:59:28 ►
device. These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they
00:59:36 ►
come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan, but in drug molecules that are dinky so we are in contact here with
00:59:50 ►
some kind of extraterrestrial technology and these are true aliens of some sort
00:59:58 ►
and God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis. Okay, second hypothesis. There is a parallel universe
01:00:10 ►
unsuspected by most human beings. It’s right here all the time. It’s inhabited. These things have
01:00:18 ►
their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth. And somehow this drug just erases this boundary, and then you
01:00:28 ►
find yourself in the elf nest.
01:00:32 ►
Okay, next hypothesis.
01:00:36 ►
These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating, perhaps they are
01:00:50 ►
human beings from the distant future. Perhaps this is what we are fated to become. You know,
01:00:59 ►
there’s always, since we were kids, the cliche beings of pure energy well it’s always been
01:01:05 ►
a little hard to wrap
01:01:06 ►
your mind around
01:01:07 ►
what that would look like
01:01:08 ►
but lo and behold
01:01:09 ►
here appear to be
01:01:11 ►
creatures of pure energy
01:01:13 ►
but there are a lot
01:01:16 ►
of problems
01:01:16 ►
with hypothesizing
01:01:18 ►
a future human
01:01:19 ►
technological breakthrough
01:01:21 ►
which would allow them
01:01:22 ►
to actually manipulate
01:01:23 ►
the past
01:01:24 ►
logical paradoxes
01:01:27 ►
and that sort of thing.
01:01:29 ►
Well, so then here’s another possibility.
01:01:32 ►
They are human beings, but they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the
01:01:39 ►
past.
01:01:40 ►
They are in the prenatal and post-life phase.
01:01:45 ►
In other words, these are either the unborn waiting in some limbo-like dimension to descend into matter,
01:01:56 ►
or they are in fact people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence and now have moved on.
01:02:07 ►
Let me not kid you, we’re talking about dead people here in that case.
01:02:11 ►
Well, if you go to the shamans who access these places through ayahuasca or the varrola snuffs or something like that,
01:02:23 ►
they will say, well, these are ancestors.
01:02:27 ►
Didn’t you read Merciliad?
01:02:30 ►
Don’t you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?
01:02:35 ►
Well, ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead people.
01:02:42 ►
And if what is actually happening here
01:02:45 ►
is that the much-argued-about soul
01:02:49 ►
is actually made visible
01:02:53 ►
by this pharmacological strategy,
01:02:57 ►
I mean, God knows why,
01:02:58 ►
but God knows why anything else is the way it is,
01:03:01 ►
then this is truly big news.
01:03:04 ►
This is the conf it is, then this is truly big news.
01:03:08 ►
This is the confounding of rationalism.
01:03:14 ►
If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology, we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead,
01:03:22 ►
then this is a 180 degree turn on the evolution of culture that
01:03:26 ►
not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate.
01:03:33 ►
I mean, it’s no challenge on that scale of things to expect visitors from Zenebel Ganubi
01:03:41 ►
or Zeta Reticuli or some other distant piece of real estate.
01:03:45 ►
But to expect visitors from, you know, beyond the grave, that’s a little confounding.
01:03:53 ►
And over time, I’ve sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on.
01:04:01 ►
And the reason it’s so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because
01:04:07 ►
at the center of the flash you find out something so unexpected so appalling and so existentially
01:04:16 ►
convincing in the moment of confronting it that you simply immediately block it out and obliterate it.
01:04:32 ►
And these things are very focused on getting you to do what they’re doing. I mean, they say, you can do what we are doing.
01:04:37 ►
Do it. Do it.
01:04:39 ►
And what they want you to do is use your voice to make objects appear in visual space as though language
01:04:52 ►
admittedly the phenomenon with which we are involved in a way that no other animal species
01:04:58 ►
on this planet is but that language as practiced by human beings is an incomplete enchantment
01:05:07 ►
and that pushed to its limits, language becomes not something heard with the ears
01:05:14 ►
but something seen with the eyes.
01:05:19 ►
On the brink, potentially, through pharmacological re-engineering of ourselves
01:05:25 ►
and through studying of these shamanic states of mind,
01:05:29 ►
about to move into a domain where we see each other’s thoughts.
01:05:36 ►
Now, normally, when we conceive of telepathy,
01:05:40 ►
we think of it as you hear what I think.
01:05:45 ►
Telepathy is you see what I mean.
01:05:49 ►
You see, telepathy is a function which goes on in the domain of seeing, not of hearing.
01:05:56 ►
And why this is important, rather than just some weird psychic ability,
01:06:02 ►
rather than just some weird psychic ability,
01:06:11 ►
is because our boundaries are based on our relationship to our language. If you could see what I mean, in a fairly profound sense, you would be me.
01:06:19 ►
In a much more profound sense than when you hear what I say.
01:06:23 ►
Because, think about it for a minute,
01:06:26 ►
analyze what normal, ordinary communication is.
01:06:30 ►
I want to communicate with you.
01:06:33 ►
I consult my internal dictionary,
01:06:37 ►
and I carefully choose words out of my dictionary,
01:06:41 ►
and I string them together according to the rules of English syntax I then activate if I’ve done things in the right order I then
01:06:50 ►
activate my vocal apparatus I impart a vibration an acoustical wave unto the
01:06:58 ►
surrounding medium which is air this vibration moves across space it enters through the holes on both sides of your head
01:07:09 ►
as a pressure wave
01:07:11 ►
you then, analyzing this incoming waveform
01:07:15 ►
rush to your dictionary
01:07:18 ►
and you break up this incoming wave signature
01:07:23 ►
and attempt to map it to words in your dictionary.
01:07:26 ►
Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same,
01:07:32 ►
then you will, lo and behold, reconstruct my thought in the confines of your brain-mind system.
01:07:41 ►
But notice the caveat that was slipped in there. If your dictionary and my
01:07:47 ►
dictionary are the same, but they never are. I mean, maybe they are if you ask, can you tell me
01:07:55 ►
what time it is or would you please turn down the stereo? But if you’re talking about anything of
01:08:00 ►
interest, depth, ambiguity, or complexity, then chances are your dictionary
01:08:07 ►
and my dictionary only generally assimilate to congruency with each other.
01:08:15 ►
So then ambiguity creeps in.
01:08:19 ►
You think you understand.
01:08:21 ►
I think you understand. I think you understand. And on that shaky foundation, we begin to build further
01:08:27 ►
semi-understandings. And then we drift off in the general direction of misapprehension eventually.
01:08:37 ►
Well, if you could see what I mean, there would be no ambiguity in our communication because the intention of language would be established in visual space
01:08:50 ►
with an existential modality about it similar to sculpture.
01:08:56 ►
I would make it, but having made it,
01:08:59 ►
you and I would both examine it, walk around it,
01:09:04 ►
and have the faith that we were looking at the
01:09:08 ►
same thing.
01:09:09 ►
And this would tend to erase our boundaries.
01:09:12 ►
So it’s very clear that communication of the ordinary sort, small mouth noises transduced
01:09:19 ►
across acoustical space and symbolic notations thereof,
01:09:30 ►
have created the global civilization that we’re living inside of. But how much more collectivist, how much more community we would have
01:09:37 ►
if we could see what each other mean.
01:09:40 ►
And so I’m beginning to assume that the proper way to think about these hallucinogens
01:09:46 ►
is as catalysts for language formation as catalysts for the project of communication
01:09:54 ►
and that the end result of the of the project of communication is that we become what we behold. In other words,
01:10:06 ►
there is not the sense of the observed
01:10:07 ►
and the observer.
01:10:09 ►
These two polarities
01:10:11 ►
of an experience
01:10:12 ►
are merged
01:10:13 ►
in the act of pure perception.
01:10:17 ►
And this is something
01:10:18 ►
emerging out of our
01:10:20 ►
biological organization.
01:10:22 ►
It’s not a cultural development
01:10:25 ►
the way a
01:10:25 ►
new invention
01:10:26 ►
or a new
01:10:28 ►
mathematical
01:10:28 ►
algorithm
01:10:29 ►
or something
01:10:30 ►
like that
01:10:30 ►
would be
01:10:30 ►
it’s
01:10:31 ►
an evolution
01:10:34 ►
of our
01:10:35 ►
neural
01:10:35 ►
capacity
01:10:39 ►
and then
01:10:40 ►
let me just
01:10:40 ►
say one more
01:10:41 ►
thing about it
01:10:41 ►
and then we
01:10:42 ►
can talk about
01:10:42 ►
it
01:10:43 ►
there is a
01:10:44 ►
model for
01:10:44 ►
this in nature that makes clear, I think, what I’m driving at.
01:10:51 ►
As many of you know, octopi change colors.
01:10:56 ►
We learn this from wonderful television programs about nature that keep us from being in nature,
01:11:03 ►
but nevertheless inform us of the
01:11:05 ►
details of nature octopi change color they have a very large repertoire of
01:11:12 ►
dots blushes spottings ripples and so forth it was for a long time thought
01:11:20 ►
that this was camouflage now it’s been understood by people who study animal communication
01:11:27 ►
that this is not camouflage, this is language.
01:11:32 ►
The octopus does not make small mouth noises that move through space
01:11:38 ►
because in the aqueous medium there are certain physical problems
01:11:43 ►
that make that an improbable way to do business.
01:11:47 ►
What the octopus does is it is its own syntax. It doesn’t generate syntax. It becomes syntax.
01:11:58 ►
So the mind of the octopus is worn on its surface. Its thoughts ripple across its geometry as color
01:12:10 ►
changes. It is in effect operationally a naked mind, not a naked brain, a naked mind. So when
01:12:19 ►
one octopus encounters another, by the mere act of looking looking it can tell how long it’s
01:12:27 ►
been since the other one has eaten how long it’s been since it’s had sex what
01:12:32 ►
its general attitude toward the world is at that moment so forth and so on it is
01:12:39 ►
able to visually apprehend the mental universe of the other.
01:12:45 ►
This is why octopi extrude ink into the water.
01:12:50 ►
It’s because it’s the only way they can create a private dimension for themselves.
01:12:56 ►
Because for an octopus to be beheld is to be understood.
01:13:00 ►
So you can think of octopus ink as correction fluid for misspoken cephalopods if you like
01:13:08 ►
well in a sense this is what we i think are headed for in a way we can already do this
01:13:16 ►
in a very crude way we have faces no other animal has a. Other animals have fronts to their heads, but we have faces.
01:13:30 ►
It’s an area where a lot of musculature is under the surface, is under the control of the intent
01:13:38 ►
to communicate. So by scowling, squinting, rolling one’s eyes, looking away, so forth and so on, we communicate. Imagine if that communicative ability, rather than being confined to a few square inches on the front of the skull, were to spread out over the entire body. in an aqueous medium, it can fold and unfold itself. It can reveal and hide parts of its body very quickly.
01:14:08 ►
It can, in fact, communicate faster than we can communicate with small mouth noises.
01:14:15 ►
And this ability to communicate is so important to the biological foundations of octopus existence
01:14:25 ►
that when the octopi, all of whom, or all of which, I’m not sure,
01:14:33 ►
evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines,
01:14:38 ►
when those environments became evolutionarily crowded,
01:14:42 ►
the octopi evolved into the benthic depths,
01:14:46 ►
into the parts of the ocean where no light ever reaches.
01:14:50 ►
But in order to maintain lines of communication, over long periods of time,
01:14:55 ►
they evolved phosphorescent organs on their bodies,
01:15:00 ►
and eyelid-like membranes covering those phosphorescent organs. So in the benthic depths of the sea,
01:15:07 ►
all that one octopus ever encounters of another is its pure linguistic intent.
01:15:14 ►
Nothing else can be seen.
01:15:16 ►
So I think that the DMT elves, all I can figure,
01:15:22 ►
is that they are trying to catalyze us to move up the scale in the refining of the bandwidth of our communication skills.
01:15:35 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:15:48 ►
Well, I don’t know about you, but after listening with you to Terrence’s octopus rap,
01:15:50 ►
I’m never going to eat calamari again.
01:15:58 ►
Actually, I made that decision a year or so ago after reading about how highly intelligent octopuses are.
01:16:03 ►
On top of that, after I learned that pigs are several times more intelligent than dogs,
01:16:09 ►
I’ve also given up eating pork, including bacon, which is my all-time favorite food.
01:16:15 ►
Now, those foods just remind me of my dog, who I have no intention of ever eating.
01:16:20 ►
Oh well, better to learn this late in life than never to learn it at all.
01:16:27 ►
I also have to give one more plug to the idea that, at heart, Terence McKenna is a poet.
01:16:33 ►
In particular, I’m thinking of his description of what it’s like for him when first entering into DMT space. He was talking about the noise and confusion he found there, and he described it as,
01:16:39 ►
and I quote, the clamor of elf hysteria, end quote.
01:16:50 ►
Now, if that isn’t the best poetic description of the machine elves who are waiting for him,
01:16:52 ►
then I don’t know what is.
01:16:54 ►
Don’t you just love little phrases like that?
01:16:56 ►
The clamor of elf hysteria.
01:17:03 ►
By the way, when Terence was talking about the mind control experiments that the CIA conducted using LSD and other psychoactive substances,
01:17:09 ►
well, if you were fascinated enough with that story to want to learn more about it,
01:17:13 ►
then I highly recommend a book titled A Terrible Mistake by H.P. Albarelli.
01:17:19 ►
Now, first of all, Terence’s description of the CIA’s LSD experiments is quite far off the mark,
01:17:26 ►
which really isn’t Terence’s fault because even as recently as 1992, when he gave this talk,
01:17:32 ►
most of the records concerning those experiments were still classified.
01:17:36 ►
Now they are largely open records, and we’ve learned much more about what went on during that dark time.
01:17:43 ►
Over the years, I’ve read probably a dozen or more books about these experiments,
01:17:47 ►
and I’ve even spoken with one man who participated in this project.
01:17:51 ►
And I can promise you that Alvarelli’s book is by far the most extensive and well-researched information
01:17:58 ►
that I’ve ever found about MKUltra, Project Artichoke, and several other CIA psychedelic research projects.
01:18:06 ►
It even documents the time that the CIA violated another nation’s sovereignty
01:18:10 ►
and dosed an entire village in France with LSD and caused several deaths in widespread panic.
01:18:17 ►
It’s a story from the 1950s that I think you should know
01:18:20 ►
if you have an interest in the early history of psychedelic research.
01:18:24 ►
I think you should know, well, if you have an interest in the early history of psychedelic research.
01:18:31 ►
Well, that’s it for me today, so for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:00:00 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.